Arkansas Blog

It was raining in Maumelle so I ran down the hill to play an hour and a half's worth of golf at War Memorial. So an old friend and his kids practicing and chipping by the first tee. Saw a group of men from the church playing when I got around that crazy dogleg on # 2. At least they have removed the heavy equipment that was in the middle of the fairway the last time I played there a month ago.

Ran into a bottleneck around # 5 when I came across a fivesome of kids. 3 boys and two girls. By the time I got to # 6 they were waiting on me to let me play through. In an unexpected display of competence, I danm near drove the green on 10. This startled the 3 walkers ahead of me. They let me on through.

Look, it is what it is at War Memorial. It ain't exactly Augusta National. Holes # 1, 12, 15 and 18 are just nuts. But I got to play 12 holes in an hour and a half for 15 bucks. I got to visit w/some folks from the neighborhood. I talked w/some nice high school kids. The old track is in as good a shape as I have ever seen it.

There have been times where I would join my brother and other scratch golfer types in that number who would blow the place up. But today was a good War Memorial day. Things were moving and I was playing golf for cheap in my backyard along w/nice folks from all over.

From where I sit tonight, I say leave it alone. I could be talked out of this b/c I am a rational man. But today was a good War Memorial Day.

New Walton Sanctioned Segregationist Academies at taxpayer expense. The Iconoclast has the scoop:

"The charter schools in Northwest Arkansas have become the 21st century equivalent of the old segregation academies, providing education for privileged whites and effectively excluding minority and Hispanic students. Haas Hall Academy has a minority population of only 11.1%, while nearby public school Springdale is 47.5% minority and Fayetteville is 25.6%. It is even worse in Benton County where the charter School of the Arts has 7.7% minority enrollment, compared with 40.1% in the Rogers public schools.

"These bastions of ethnic segregation are supported by the $800,000 Walton-financed charter school promotion subsidiary at the University of Arkansas College of Education, headed by a Walton Foundation-nominated director, Caroline Proctor, formerly of the failed charter school in lily-white Maumelle. So much for the University's supposed commitment to diversity, either on its own campus or in the charter schools it supports for the Walton interests.

Who, or what, is the "Iconoclast"?

Who, or what, is the "Iconoclast"?

Ahh...this new appearance is killing me. Come on brantley; you know the few conservatives that you have reading the postings of the intelligentsia on arktimes.com are seizing right now attempting to navigate this unknown land!

Who, or what, is the "Iconoclast"?<<

Click on bluename link above to go to Iconoclast website.

What do you think? Click on Cato

I hate this font.

This is an update from Zack (small wide spot in the road in Searcy County) as reported in the MOUNTAIN WAVE. They tout themselves as One Of Arkansas' 10 Leading Weeklies. I wonder where the AR TIMES rates!

"We've still got a stray dog around our place in case anyone's lost one or looking for him, he likes to carry off shoes, tear up lawn furniture, chew up flowers and electrical cords and toys. If you've lost him he'll be in our front yard till morning. Then he heads toward the backyard, feel free to come and get him."

The Wave also has updates from Punkin Flat, Shady Grove, Red Hat, Snowball, Grassy Gap and others.

This is why I live in Little Rock during the week to earn a living and, to have a life, bout a mile down Brush Creek from Zack on the weekends.

DBI could come for a weekend to get away and get some R&R which it lately sounds like he could really use.

There is all kinds of hunting and fishing but that is too much work for me so I just hike. I've been told that hiking is just walking where it is ok to pee. I mention DBI because I figure he wouldn't get on to me about my drinking. My wife isn't good at math and thinks if I have a single beer at noon on Sunday she has to drive home that night so I won't get a DWI.

I've tried to explain that a 190# guy needs more than 12 ounces of beer to get anywhere near .08 on a breath-a-lizer, but, this way she drives and I can take a nap or look at all the gas wells being drilled up and down Hwy 65. Looks like a bunch of people are becoming tycoons out that way.

Anway, after 5 days worrying about Lake Maumelle, Cheney, Bush, Gonzalas, and Iraq I can go to the woods and read The Wave. The top left front page headline is, "Board Discusses PeeWee Football Program". Frankie Valens is playing at the Petit Jean Electric Building. That must be their equivalent of the Alltel Arena. I also guess Frankie's career has waned since he sang "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".

Next there is an announcement that there is a baby shower at the Searcy County Senior Center. That should be front page news.

Announcement that they will marking plots at the Red Hill Cemetary with concrete on August 4th. Bring your Quick-Crete and someone will assist you.

KD's BBQ and Multi-family Yardsale is August 2,3,&4th. At Kenneth's house. I guess you can just ask directions.

There is a scratch and Dent Grocery Sale at Norman's Bargain Barn. But with the botulism recall going on I suggest not buying bulging or puffed up cans.

The New Life Tabernacle is have a Pot Luck/Going Away Dinner Friday but asks you to bring your own eating utensils, plus there will be a money tree.

Lastly, the Leslie 4H had a great success at their bake sale which was sponsored by JD's Tire Pizza and More in Damascus.

The reason for the above list is to remind you of what the Bush/Cheney cabal in the White House has robbed you of, the ability to enjoy life and concern yourselves with your family and community. Instead we are forced to become political activists and do all we can to end this Iraq madness and hopefully the next generation can spend their effort energies organizing PeeWee footballl and bake sales.

I'll just toss this out there. It's not as newsy as it is gossipy, but Friday afternoon I was getting onto an elevator at LRSD HQ as Superintendent Brooks was exiting . After the doors closed, one lady in the car said to another, "So you may be going to work for him, huh?"

eureka i saw in the paper today that ya'll had a town full of hell's angels for a week. no trouble, big tippers, nice, clean, friendly. hippies were in the ozarks and the forest service went nuts. doesn't that seem a little strange? the peace and love crowd drives them nuts and the troublermakers are no trouble and there is no publicity.

Zonker, have you looked at a Harley rider lately? They are all midlife crisis dentists and former bond daddies that took Viagra but had decreased vision and a 4 hour woody so now the only way to get any feeling down there is by revving a Hard-Tail Hog. That is accountant talk for "going vroom vroom on a big motorcycle.

Of course those posers went to Eureka Springs and filled their saddle bags with quilts and trinkets instead of raising hell.

i saw where joe biden gave it back to guliani today. telling him that tough talk does not make up for 6 years of failed policies which is all that has happened under republican policies. that is about all rudy has is to sound tough like bush and as tired as people are of bush they should tire of rudi pretty soon i hope, if the dems keep hammering away at him now. we can't let him start sounding too good. if he keeps sounding like a hero he may get momentum. that is something we don't need is a hero like him. after seeing that picture of thompson's wife the other day i don't worry much about him. i can't imagine little old ladies voting for him after finding out he divorced his wife and married somebody that looked like that. my grandmother and her friends would have called her all kind of names. he will never win with a wife like that.

Citizen
I found Zack. I thought I recalled it from a trip to Mt.View folk festival eons ago. We camped around there somewhere. Its on County Rd 416 according to Google Maps. You're almost exactly in between
Harrison and Mt. View. It's unincorporated so should be fun for city fathers or who ever runs the place, if it needs running. 35N57 92W39, it's even in my electronic Atlas. Are you close to a river or stream? Should be a few good springs around if not contaminated with chicken shit runoff.

Well I avoided that quagmire like the plague but they do have a good time. Actually, lots of State Police and helicopter surveillance high and low.. I have a feeling the Police have to draw straws to get good gigs like this and that they line up for a chance to draw. Northern California and NW Arkansas are my favorite places to ride bikes... Unfortunately I live way to far down a sharp rocky road to justify keeping a bike anymore.

Lots of rainbow folks migrated to ES after their vacation down south.. They were all welcomed with open arms, some got work and stayed, some got rides to California or wherever they wanted to go. None that I know of tried to shoplift or had any trouble with the law.

The Bikers have always been a good group, so good that the city cannot bring itself to outlaw those loud tail pipes much as some would like to.

Meanwhile while I was at work, I missed the NASCAR Brickyard 400 and the live telecast.

Those that would rather had watched the AFL (Arena Football) Championship also missed it being in HDTV locally because of KATV"s greed.

The station reportedly aired informercials instead according to an AVS Forum poster.

This has happened with World Cup Soccer in the past, and MLS and any programming (except the Hogs and Golf) that KATV doesn't think will appeal to Jack in Batesville.

Its bad enough that we in Arkansas have to endure retrograde laws, bastard amendments to our state constitution and idiots in govenment. Having gatekeepers like KATV censor what is good for us gives those outside the state an excuse to say ".....what a bunch of dumn-ass hicks".

It should be my choice to watch or not watch the AFL, not KATV's. If KATV doesn't want to air ABC programming, it should become an independent or affiliate with MNTV, etc.

CH, I remember the time you speak of and it's just a memory for most of us. I was much happier when I didn't know a damn thing. When my wife and I first got married a series of family tragedies gave us the time and the money to live exactly as we pleased for a couple of years. We didn't leave the house each day without our dose of Perry Mason reruns on TBS. We had days we felt too fat to do anything useful. We drove around a lot and enjoyed the beauty of Arkansas.

The next phase of life involved a couple of kids and a lot of hard work and hard luck. But still there was a certain enjoyment in life because we weren't worrying that America was on the wrong track. Closer to home we had Bumpers, Pryor and Clinton in LR. Even with the Frank White break, it was pretty much business as usual. We didn't talk or think about it much, but we knew America was the greatest country on earth and while politicians might be crooked, none of them, even the worst would sell us down the river. I wish like hell I had appreciated those times more.

Bush wants us to believe the world changed on 9-11. It makes nice advertising, but it's smoke and mirrors. Remember November and December of 2000. I witnessed our country acting in ways I'd never seen before. An election was stolen right before our very eyes. James Baker, Katherine Harris, Fox News and finally the Supreme Court. They gave us Cheney-Bush. For me the world changed in those 2 months and it's never been the same. The rest of the world got to see Bush's limo pelted with eggs. But that video was not shown in the USA. Wonder why? I watched it on the BBC online. NBC, CBS, ABC, nor Fox thought it was important enough for Americans to see.

The fix was in, what fix and who paid for it.....I still can't say. And since that time we've lost what CH was dramatizing for us. I guess the totally uninformed are still having some kind of happy life. But who knows....with all the fear mongering going on from the White House on down, the average Wal-Mart shopper may not be sleeping any better than those of us on this blog. It makes me want the other shoe to drop. This waiting is killing me. If our country is about to explode.....get on with it! If I could quit the damn worrying, I've got a nice life and a great family. But for the first time in my life I must be feeling what all those men felt when they ran to enlist on Dec. 8th, 1941. There are a few things more important than what we'll have for dinner tomorrow night and how tall my grass may get.

If I'm insane, it must be some kind of high functioning insanity. I'm the same person I've always been except for being informed and aware and royally pissed off. I've got a good memory and on top of remembering the world CH talks about, I remember when no Arkansas US Representative stood in the House chamber wagging his bony finger in the face of the only President ever elected from our state for playing around with a female intern while at the same time going back home at night and listening while his brother, an Arkansas Senator had sex with his female staffer in the next bedroom.

I remember when no Arkansas Governor destroyed all the records as he was going out the door, leaving a big bill and damaged equipment to be replaced with our tax money. I remember that no other Arkansas Senator in our history ever voted to torture people. I don't remember any other Arkansas Democratic Senator who voted with the Republicans 73% of the time and was hounded and accused of being a Republican in disguise. Who still cannot be counted on to vote with his party though the war his Republican friends started couldn't be going more badly.

I don't believe I'm the one whose insane here. It is not insanity to be upset when your government is going to hell and taking you with it. 231 years later we still remember the name Benedict Arnold and for good reason. Arnold tried to stab young America in the back. He profited off the war we were fighting for the future of a new idea. He sold us-US down the river. And we were taught in school to hate him, what he did and everything he stood for.

Now in Cheney and Bush and a hundred other Republicans we have people doing things 100 times worse than Benedict Arnold. We have no idea at present who will win, how close we are to the edge, how much danger we're in. Yet people continue to shop and worry about white trash drunk actresses......as blind to the danger as we were when we went to bed September 10th, 2001.

I see dead people.....3648 US solders.....hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis....with no end in sight.
I see George W. Bush quietly signing documents saying he can stay in office as long as we're at war. He can keep us at war forever. Whose dumb enough to not see what happens next? At some point years from now, after years and years of war, the rest of the world will have enough and they'll come after us on our soil. Imagine bombed out Wal-Mart Super Centers. Imagine your churches and schools in flames. Imagine acting out the scenes we've seen of grief-stricken Iraqi parents bending over the pile of smoking bloody flesh that was their child only minutes before.....only this time it's you and that bloody mess on the churned up ground is your child, your sister, your wife.

Along with record profits for Halliburton, Exxon, and Blackwater USA, Cheney is bringing the wrath of the world upon America. It won't come from rock throwing Iraqis, but you can bet they'll be in the group of nations fueled by Chinese money and weapons that come to conquer America. They'll come for several reasons, to stop us from endlessly waging war, to pay us back for our aggression and weapons we've sold and because we'll be bankrupt and weakened though our top 1% will all be trillionaires by then. But our Government will be broke. NAFTA will have taken our jobs, we'll be starving. Our kids will join the military just to eat.... completing an endless cycle of war, death and destruction.

No.....I can't enjoy a porch swing or a boat ride or day at the park. I'm scared and I'm mad and I'm ready to do something about it. I've got no PHD, but I know when I'm lied to and I know when nothing adds up we're in trouble. Wake up your friends and your neighbors. Trouble is here, disaster is coming.

PS Prouster, don't bother reading this, it's way too long. You'll just be mad.

Lwood,

Zack is about 2 miles up the creek from the Buffalo River. As a crow flies Zack is closest to Gilbert but by road they are 25 miles apart.

The area is full of springs and enough caves to hide Osama for another 6 years. It is on County Road 46 not 416 but getting around up there is difficult because the locals have at least 3 names for every creek or hollow. You need to know that Thorny Gate is also Bee Branch creek and also the olod railroad grade depending on who is telling you were to stay out of there becasue Earldene's boy is making meth up there and has been getting real paranoid lately.

" . . . depending on who is telling you were to stay out of there becasue Earldene's boy is making meth up there and has been getting real paranoid lately."

Lordie, Citizen home, just when I was about to tell hubby I had heard of a real nice place to visit some weekend.
Of course, we don't go down in our back forty in the summer either, not since a plane flew over our house at treetop level -- could you call it strafing? -- from that direction several times and hubby cautioned me that I really don't want to go hunting for muscadines in a month or so, just in case someone had a little patch of MaryJane somewhere back there.
Oddly enough, he figures we'd have more problems with the law if they're watching such a thing. It's not the "gardeners" he's particularly worried about since he has a pretty good idea who we might be dealing with. And he's right. Any gardeners we have back there are really pretty nice folks.
The law around here? Well, I'm not sure about this administration, but the previous one? We don't even want to go there. But this adminstration was handpicked by the previous one.
'Nuff said, I guess.

I love it - what a difference a day makes. :
I just sent a quick note to Frank Fellone over at the ARKDEMZETTE.
The best part is when one of the locals compared the two biker gangs to the Hatfields and McCoys and the people who live in the Ozarks "understand it".
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

It's a shame that the Hell's Angels didn't read the article from Sunday.
Maybe the reporting was done too soon?
I wanted to email Ginny Laroe directly, but she doesn't seem to have an email address there at the paper.

So, maybe they aren't the nice guys they seemed to be. I wonder how the people in Eureka Springs will welcome them next year?
They didn't deserve the article in the paper on Sunday. Today's news is more in line with their history.
Headlines from the ARKDEMGAZ:
6 in Hells Angels arrested after 4 rival bikers stabbed
Biker gang fails to abide by notorious reputation

Irish I read that story in the local rag - TMN- all so shocked that biker gangs would get in a fight. Imagine that!

Local story on bluename link